Visions of the Future
The Distant Past, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
Number of pages: 144
Publisher: Oxford University Press
BBB Library: Technology and Globalization
ISBN: 978-0195102864
Editorial Review
In a brilliant conclusion drawing together the threat of nuclear blackmail, global warming and the growing commodification of life represented by video games, voice mail, and VCRs, Visions of the Future issues a call to face the challenges of the twenty-first century with a new resolve strengthened by the inspiration of our collective past.
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Wisdom to Share
All contemplations of the future—magical, religious, social, even scientific—exist at some deep level to deny, or at least to come to terms with, the terrifying prospect of death's finality. The scientific concept of time undoubtedly has attributes that can be described apart from life, but the need to construct the idea of a "future" would be meaningless without the tacit assumption that humanity will be there to inhabit it.
Civilization arises first in communities whose situational characteristics lend themselves to the "caging" of their individual members, and perhaps of even greater importance, of the economic, social, ideological, and military organizations by which the larger societal entity is defined and defended. As such, posthistoric society is best conceived not as a freely undertaken movement upward, but as a forced adaptation to the boundaries of organized collective life.
Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relationship between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.
There are two aspects in which Yesterday differed fundamentally from the preceding Distant Past. The first is that it introduced the notion of progress. The second is that its unique dynamism was not enjoyed by all societies.
The absence of a scientific ethos did not prevent the Chinese from producing cast iron fifteen hundred years and the modern horse collar one thousand years, before the West; from far exceeding Europe in the accuracy of its clocks; or from inventing and using paper for books and money (as well as for lavatory purposes) while Europeans were using parchment, coins, and unsanitary sponges.
Visions of the future express the ethos of their times, and we must remind ourselves, to begin, in the ways in which the visions of Today differ from those of the Distant Past.
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